Political History

In the Polish-Russian dispute over what happened in 1939, rival myth-making is being driven by domestic political calculations on both sides. Polish right-wing politicians including the present president have used the memory of 1939 and the alleged continuity of Soviet and Russian policy to whip up nationalist feelings and bolster their support.

There are two battling story lines about the career of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy: Here at the Prospect,
we recall the Lion of Liberalism, treating his 1980 convention speech
as the hinge of his long career. Meanwhile, on cable news, or in the
hands of Dan Balz at The Washington Post, he is the icon of
bipartisan compromise, whose close working partnership with Sen. Orrin
Hatch of Utah among others was legendary.

"We had to
struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial
monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism,
sectionalism, war profiteering," President Franklin Roosevelt told an
audience in Madison Square Garden in 1936. "They had begun to consider
the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own
affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as
dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our
history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they
stand today.

Think back to the spring of 1968. The U.S. is mired in Vietnam. The country is in turmoil. The sitting Democratic president abruptly pulls out of his campaign for reelection, and the leading conservative columnist of the day neither gloats nor does a victory dance.

Soon after my former roommate was killed in Iraq, Sen. Ted Kennedy
called me. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I wasn't pleased to get the
call. I was on the senator's staff at the time, and he sometimes called
on weekends with policy questions, usually about education funding. The
calls usually required some quick fact-checking at the least, and
sometimes a trip into the office.

To judge from his faltering campaign for healthcare reform, President Obama, well-read as he is, appears to have neglected to read Machiavelli. If he had done so, the American president would have learned this from the Florentine statesman and philosopher in "The Prince":

Don't get too outraged, those of you who are looking down your noses at those
unreasonable, misinformed anti-healthcare-reform town hallers. No matter what
particular clan, tribe or party you belong to, you can't really disown them any
more than you can your own grandmother. You may not agree with them, but their
brand of hotheaded, self-righteous, obnoxious, stick-it-to-the-manism is as
American as apple pie.

All but the most ostrich-like of conservatives recognize that their movement
is at its lowest ebb in more than three
decades. Democrats control the presidency
and both chambers of Congress, and the polarization of the two major parties has rendered
conservatives more isolated and irrelevant to
policymaking than in
their previous stints in
the minority.

In my first
foray into political life in the 1970s, I worked during college on the
staff of a liberal Democrat in the Texas state Senate. Only a few years
earlier, Patty Hearst had been kidnapped and brainwashed by the
Symbionese Liberation Army, and a moral panic about cults seducing
college kids was sweeping the nation. One result was the rise of a new,
thankfully ephemeral profession: "deprogrammers" who for pay would
kidnap a young person from a cult and break the spell, by means of
isolation, interrogation and maybe reruns of "The Waltons."